CSotD: Death, Guilt and Other Funny Stuff
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How funny is death? Well, the closer it comes the less I fret over it. I’m pretty healthy, but I’m in the home stretch and while I expect another decade, nothing was ever guaranteed, except that Death would show up like Alan Funt — when you least expect it, you’re elected.
Unless you’re this guy, who was beginning to wonder if he was ever going to show up, which brings me to the issue of pop stars. I see people on social media upset because some actor or musician from their youth has bought the farm, and my reaction is that once you hit 80, checking out is an inevitability, not a tragedy.
Whoever was famous when you were a kid is likely to check out before you do, but that’s why I like Janis Ian so much, because she hit the charts when I was still in high school but she’s a year younger. Even Jackson Browne is older than either of us, and he was a wunderkind.
You can catch a documentary about Janis on PBS’s American Masters, but she’s still younger than me. And cooler, but that wasn’t my point.
Speaking of death, my reaction to today’s In The Bleachers was to flash on the Twilight Zone episode A Nice Place to Visit, in which a punk gambler dies and, in the afterlife, has everything he could want and never loses. He thinks he’s in heaven, for awhile.
In this version of the story, a golfer dies and finds himself on a fantastic golf course, but immediately loses his last ball, because it isn’t heaven.
BTW, only about 14% of Americans play golf. Perhaps all the golf cartoons are evidence that 86% of us are not in heaven.
Here’s another joke about death, which explains a major theory about why dogs enjoy toys that squeak, which is quite possibly correct. It might also explain the dogs who immediately tear the squeaker out of a toy and then consider the game over.
Pretty grim source of humor, I thought.
I don’t think dogs need to feel guilty about making small rodents squeak once and then never again, but here’s the Other Coast with a whole list of other things dogs shouldn’t have to confess.
There have been studies in which Experts have proven that dogs do not feel guilt and that any woebegone expression is a response to your anger. I have not yet read an Expert analysis of why the dog doesn’t greet you at the door on days when there is garbage strewn around the kitchen.
Dogs are dogs, and some things you can’t train them out of doing. It’s your fault if you leave a sandwich on the counter with a known food thief in the room.
I have yet to see anyone who can recognize his faults, look inside himself, and put the blame there. — K’ung Fu-Tzu
After several years of coaching youth soccer, I took a coaching efficiency course where they told us that coaching happens at practice and that gametime is too late. Yelling then only confuses your players.
So at the next practice, I asked the team if my instructions were helpful or if I should shut up and let them play. Their vote was immediate and unanimous.
I’ve been pleased to see how many rec leagues today require coaches and parents to STFU and let the kids play, and that it doesn’t change the scores, only the atmosphere.
This near-death gag made me laugh because I’ve been hit by the same phenomenon on far less fraught occasions. My response is “forget it, then,” but obviously this fellow doesn’t have that option.
I have some sympathy with sites that encourage “engagement.” But there’s a point at which they become like one of those free vacations where you have to sit through a pitch about time shares.
Someone wrote that “the easiest decision a reader can make is to stop reading.” Doubly true of web surfing, so don’t make things too challenging.
Whamond came back the next Sunday with a related complaint and this time I did laugh, because there’s a site I need to visit periodically which, if you can’t remember your password, lets you reset it, but first you have to enter the password you can’t remember.
I also tried to subscribe to a site that wanted me to create a password before they’d take my money. Each password I tried was “invalid” but they never said why. I tried making it longer, I tried adding a “special character,” I added a capital letter, I made sure none of the numbers were consecutive.
I decided not to give them money after all. Seemed like an easy solution.
There are ways of describing art without (A) sounding like a pretentious ass and (B) removing all the joy from it.
And it’s not just art. I like wine, but I don’t want a glass of chocolate with hints of raspberry and elements of garbanzo beans or whatever, and I despise book reviews in which the reviewer writes as if he thinks he’s the brilliant author whose prose we’re there for.
As I’ve said before, my senior year we banned the word “evocative” in our seminar because it was a stupid, pretentious word that took the place of actual thought.
Back in the day, somebody was droning on about the valley in Mexico from which a particular stash had come and what particular vibe we might expect from it, and a biker friend growled, “There’s two kinds of weed. There’s the kind that gets me off, and the kind that doesn’t get me off. I like the stuff that gets me off.”
I’ll drink to that.
This xkcd came along just after I’d listened to Charlie Sykes’ podcast with University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers, which I strongly recommend.
Specific to counting money, Wolfers explained that a million would fit in a briefcase, a billion would fit in enough briefcases to fill a bus, and a trillion would involve layers of stuffed buses filling the football stadium at Michigan.
I found his explanation worthwhile and not at all evocative.
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